What would you do without language? Point at things you wanted? Tug on a sleeve to get a person’s attention? Wave your hands around to show your plans for the future?
Fortunately, human beings do have language. Just how many languages are there? No one can say. One group of scholars counted 6,703 living languages. Some are spoken by millions of people. Most are spoken by many fewer than that. By the time you read this, some of these languages may have died out, along with their last native speakers. That’s why linguists, or people who study languages, are recording as many languages as they can.